Electricity demand is surging nationwide after two decades of stability. However, a growing base of customers with distributed energy resources (DERs)—expected to add 217GW of capacity to the grid by 2029—presents an unprecedented opportunity to meet these needs through demand-side solutions that are both cheaper and faster to deploy than conventional generation.
One challenge for utilities is getting customers to participate in clean energy initiatives and programs. Both awareness and interest in customer programs—including demand response, energy efficiency, and time-varying rates—remain lukewarm, with only about half of customers aware of available programs, and significantly less participating.
Customer engagement solutions like customer portals, energy reports, updates & alerts, and utility marketplaces can help drive customer participation by delivering personalized energy insights and recommendations for energy-saving programs and offerings. Utilities can unlock full value from their customer engagement touchpoints with business intelligence tooling like Uplight’s Customer Insights Dashboard to segment, target, and recruit customers based on their unique characteristics.
Customer Insights Dashboard Provides Actionable Business Intelligence
Uplight’s Customer Insights Dashboard provides a simple, user-friendly business intelligence interface with filtering, charts, and visualizations to help utility program managers understand their customer base and how best to target them. Utilities can use this tool to help bridge the participation gap with key customer insights that inform segmentation, messaging, and action.
The Customer Insights Dashboard leverages the power of our unified data platform, which provides a 360 degree view of the energy consumer based on data from energy usage, applications, surveys and interactions, demographics and firmographics, and more. It also surfaces insights from our advanced machine learning & AI techniques. For instance, within the Customer Insights Dashboard a utility can see whether a particular household has EV charging; this insight is informed by EV detection machine learning model that accurately predicts the presence of charging at households.
Unlock Targeted Customer Program Recruitment
One of the most impactful applications for utilities is in program targeting. Traditional utility programs often rely on broad outreach with relatively low participation rates—but data-driven approaches enable much more precise targeting, improving both effectiveness and cost efficiency.
Electric vehicle programs provide a clear example; rather than marketing charging solutions to all customers, utilities can identify existing EV owners and target them with relevant time-of-use rates or managed charging programs, customizing messaging based on their current charging patterns. They can also leverage these granular insights, utilities could offer weatherization for low-income customers with high heating, or help distribute heat pump incentives for customers with aging heating systems and appropriate electrical set-up.
The Customer Insights Dashboard makes it easy to use targeted recruitment strategies like this. After applying filters for desired segmentation, including EV detection confidence and customer propensity, utility program managers can easily export a marketing list to use for their campaigns. Alternatively, they can work with Uplight’s talented in-house marketing to deploy finely segmented recruitment campaigns oriented around driving action.
Targeted recruitment marketing works. When a utility partner worked with Uplight to segment its likely EV drivers and provide custom recruitment marketing to those customers, it sent nearly 4,000 emails with a call to action around DR enrollment. That focused effort resulted in a >12% increase in enrollment—all from a single email.
The Future of Utility Customer Engagement
Utilities have an opportunity to leverage mass-market customer participation to build cost-effective demand-side programs that support an affordable, reliable, and increasingly clean grid. As smart grid technologies advance and customer energy behaviors become more complex, a data-driven, customer-centric approach to customer engagement is crucial. Leveraging customer insights to drive targeted recruitment into utility offerings can be a critical piece of that puzzle.
